热门商业书籍

The Buzz on Business Books

WSJ sister blog BuzzWatch runs occasional features on the hottest books, music, films and other entertainments from around the world. This week, there’s a post on one of the top-selling business books in China– the Western marketing classic “Influence: The Power of Persuasion,” by Robert Cialdini–discussing how the book’s six “weapons of influence” mesh with Chinese values:

Reciprocity, for example, could be seen as correlating to guanxi (relationships), often the basis on which anything gets done in China: You know someone, they help you, and you help them later. Social proof may be an even more powerful force in China than it is in the U.S., because of China’s long history of communal social structures and socializing patterns. And respect for authority is the cornerstone of Confucian philosophy.

But not everyone agrees.

One disgruntled reader complained on Dangdang.com that “Influence” isn’t “consistent with conditions in China.” Which raises the possibility that what interests a Chinese audience in “Influence” is not so much its reinforcement of traditional Chinese values as the insights it offers about how people in a developed country with a market economy, like the U.S., make decisions.

As another commenter on Dangdang.com put it: “In this era of information explosion, the cost of decision-making is increasingly high. Under the current leadership style, we’ve become accustomed to relying on others [to make decisions], and we’ve lost our own judgment. But . . . why can’t we use these [Six Weapons of Influence] to make ourselves happy?”

In an interview with the WSJ this week, Alibaba.com CEO David Wei cautioned against reading too many business books. His advice: choose one or two books and reread them every now and again.

“As you grow in your business career, you will learn different things from the same book,” says Wei.

Wei’s own pick: Jack Welch’s “Winning.”